U of C Reprints: The Hunter

By Trent

Most of the cover images I’ve seen online of the new University of Chicago Press Parker reprint series have been very small. They were kind enough to send me some larger images, and I’ll be featuring the first three this week.

I just reread this over the last few days. Needed a Stark fix. I don’t know if I’m the first person on this site to mention this, but, even accepting the fact Parker is ultra-hard and can snap your neck like a chopstick and all that, does it seem unbelievable he would get away with what he did to “The Outfit”?

Now, we all know “the Outfit” is a euphemism for the Mafia AKA La Cosa Nostra, AKA The Hand AKA a bunch of badly dressed Italianite men whom it would be best if you don’t cut off on the freeway.

Why DEW chose to make the heads of this “organization” have names like Bronson, Carter and Fairfax is bewildering, because rest assured, the heads of this type of organization would undoubtedly have names that end with a vowel and sound like an appetizer at The Olive Garden. Was it because he feared coming across as ethnically prejudiced? (Remember, this was 1962.) We’ll never know.

But in a reality akin to our own, or even a cheap facsimile, Parker would have been sliced, diced, cuisinarted, and transformed into the ingredients of a Bob’s Big Boy if he’d crossed the “real” outfit in the style he did in The Hunter. Single-O’s as Parker calls them, fare badly against the Mafia. Even whole factions of crooks do not have much of a chance of emerging unscathed from an encounter with those humorless Italianite men in their Izod jumpsuits and heavy Gold necklaces.

If the novel were released today, you might say it’d be more realistic that such an event could happen, as the Mafia today is a pale shell of it’s glory days. But in the time frame of The Hunter, they virtually had everything zipped up. Only the military/industrial complex had more power, and it’s even innaccurate to draw a distinction between the two entities because they often were interchangeable, as the Kennedy assassination showed us.

Amyway, that’s my take. The Hunter is unbelievably well written fiction, but Parker sticking it to the mafia is just that–fiction.

LOVE your dress!! I bought one just like it for my deathgur for her birthday – yes, my child is now nearly the same size as me! It’s crazy – and happened way too fast. Love it. So glad you two had a date night!!

If I remember correctly Westlake based the Outfit on the Chicago Outfit which was a lot more open to non-Italian ethnicities than most Mafia groups. You had to be Italian to be “made”, but that was basically a meaningless title. One of it’s chief enforcers was even black. So that’s probably the reason why the leaders had names like Bronson. Of course, the real Chicago Outfit was still mostly Italian.

The crime boss in Slayground and Butcher’s Moon was Italian. Of course, the Outfit was portrayed as more of a loose coalition in Butcher’s Moon than as a monolithic corporation as in The Hunter.

It was a pretty sensitive point among most Italian Americans to talk about The Mafia back then–these days it’s different, probably in part because of The Sopranos, and The Godfather movies before that.

I don’t think Westlake was concerned about PC, but he was concerned with avoiding cliches that would get in the way of telling the story. If he made it Parker (clearly of Northern European ancestry) vs. the Italian Mob, that’s a distraction from what the story is about, which is individualism vs. corporatism. Parker and his loosely-affiliated heister associates vs. a top-down hierarchy where everybody has to do what he’s told and nobody is free to innovate–The Outfit has all the power, but power has made it stupid and slow-moving and overconfident.

Later on, he could have Italian American gangsters (like in Slayground and Butcher’s Moon), but at this point he wanted to stay focused on what mattered, and not worry if he was getting concepts like “Omerta” right or not. It’s not a documentary. It’s also not one of those Executioner novels. Parker isn’t trying to get rid of The Outfit. He just wants what he’s owed. It’s entirely possible for a seemingly well-protected mob boss to be executed by a small well-disciplined crew–it’s happened many times. Parker manages to avoid reprisals by making sure he’s okay with the second-in-command, who wants to take over from Bronson. Would it all go so smoothly in reality? No, and this isn’t reality. That’s not what we’re reading the books for.

It may be a fantasy that a few independent operators could take down the head of a crime corporation, but then again, who would have believed that guys like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, working out of garages and basements, could take over from IBM in a relatively short time? The difference (aside from the violence) is that Parker isn’t interested in taking over. He doesn’t care who runs The Outfit, as long as The Outfit pays him what he’s owed, and keeps out of his way. If he took over from them, he’d become like them. He’s not interested in that. He doesn’t want power–just freedom.

No, in the original draft he was killed trying to escape some detectives who pick him up for questioning after he’s eluded The Outfit’s killers. It took only a very minor tweak to set things up so that there could be more books. Praise Bucklin Moon.

Matthew, Jay, great posts, guys. I did not know that (doing my best Carson impression). I guess the Chicago mob was sort of an equal oppurtunity criminal organization;-) lol At least back in the 60’s.

Jay, Chris is right–I did some research, and Parker got it from the coppers.

What I do find interesting, though, is DEW agreed to make the change, dropping an ending which I think we all agree was more realistic, and switched to a more … how shall I put it? Fantasy-based ending where Parker keeps on keepin’ on.

Now don’t get me wrong: Thank God he did, because we all would have been deprived of several more wonderful novels. But it does reveal that DEW wasn’t above making purely commercial decisions about his “art”. That’s not a putdown, guys/gals, so please, no backlash, I’m just saying you always hear about artistic integrity and so forth: I say worry about your artistic ability before you worry about your artistic integrity.

When my wife filed her first return years ago, her patrnes told her while she was writing her check “don’t forget to write ‘taxes suck’ in the memo section,” and she’d begun writing it before realizing they were only joking.

As Chris also noted, all praise and thanks to Bucklin Moon who recognized the potential in creating a series whose protagonist was like no other before and for asking DEW to change the ending and keep the saga going. Crime fiction is all the better for it!

I'll have more at the site when I get a chance to write it, but this is sad news. Brian Garfield was not only a hell of a writer, but a really nice guy.
https://t.co/ZtFwM1Q9dB

Ralph Dennis' Hardman series begins coming back in print today from Brash Books. Read about Dennis here, including his previously unpublished novel that "...makes Parker look like a sissy." I haven't read Dennis' work yet, but lots of friends are fans. https://t.co/ItJvWdKeje